Government Shutdown: Chilling Effects on Antarctic Research

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Scientists who risk their lives for Antarctic research fear their
entire field season may be canceled because of the ongoing
government shutdown.

The U.S. Antarctic research program relies on government-funded
planes, ships and tractors to transport scientists and equipment
across the frozen ice and seas. After the Oct. 1
government shutdown, all travel stopped, except for flights
to supply people already at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. And
the summer research program, originally scheduled to kick off
Oct. 3, is on hold until the congressional standoff ends.

Last week, contractor Lockheed Martin told researchers by email
that a decision would be made this week of whether to shut down
the three Antarctic research bases and leave behind a skeleton
crew,
Nature News reported. Lockheed Martin contracts with the
National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the United States'
Antarctic research program.

But even if the shutdown ends soon, some key Antarctic projects
are already in jeopardy. Among the affected projects is
NASA's IceBridge campaign, which tracks yearly changes in the
polar ice sheets. Because of the furlough, NASA workers can't
install equipment on the IceBridge research plane to prep for its
Antarctic trip, scheduled for late October.

"If this situation continues, it will eventually cancel the
mission for 2013," said Eric Rignot, a senior research scientist
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif.,
who is involved with IceBridge. JPL is run by a private
contractor, the California Institute of Technology, and is
still open during the shutdown. The lead scientist for
IceBridge, Michael Studinger, is at NASA's Goddard Lab and is on
furlough.

IceBridge is a six-year campaign to monitor how glaciers, sea ice
and ice sheets respond to climate change. Scientists use an
instrument-laden P-3 aircraft to make a year-to-year comparison,
as well as to investigate new regions. IceBridge fills the gap
between the defunct ICESat satellite and the planned ICESat-2,
scheduled to launch in 2016.

Interrupting year-to-year projects like IceBridge wreaks havoc on
the accuracy of scientist's data sets, said Robin Bell, who is
involved in the IceBridge project.

"We would lose important data points in measuring how the ice
sheets are changing," said Robin Bell, a senior scientist at the
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New
York. "It is as if we decided it was a good idea to skip the
annual physical," Bell told LiveScience.

"It is very valuable to have a continuous unbroken data series,"
added Andrew Fountain, a glaciologist at Portland State
University in Oregon who works in Antarctica's Dry Valleys and is
not involved with IceBridge. "Having a gap in the data makes the
analysis of trends — such as warming/cooling and
growing/shrinking — that much more difficult and the statistical
analysis more challenging," Fountain told LiveScience by
email.

Devastating effect

Outright canceling the summer field season would be especially
devastating for early-career scientists and graduate students,
who may rely on a single project for their data and funding.

"If we can't get to our sites, it will be another year before we
have any data to work with, drastically impeding progress on our
research," said Samantha Hansen, a geophysicist at the University
of Alabama. Hansen planned to collect data from a network of
seismometers set out on the ice last year. The project will
reveal Antarctica's
hidden geologic structures.

"Additionally, some stations are deployed in regions with high
snow-accumulation rates, and if left unattended for another year,
they could be buried completely — making them irretrievable,"
Hansen told LiveScience by email. "I've lost a lot of sleep
worrying about this situation."

Other major projects that could be lost this year include
WISSARD, the return to
Lake Whillans, where microbial life was discovered last year
in a buried Antarctic lake. Researchers also planned to drill ice
cores to investigate climate change, study penguins and seals,
and observe space from a South Pole telescope.

Editor's note: This story was updated Oct. 7
to correct that Samantha Hansen works at the University of
Alabama.